George I of Georgia

George I inherited the newly united Georgian kingdom from his father Bagrat III and spent most of his short reign fighting the Byzantine Empire for the lands of David III of Tao, a war he lost. Born in 998 or, by another reckoning, 1002, the son of Bagrat III and Martha, he came to the throne on his father's death on 7 May 1014. He began from weakness: within a year the nobility compelled him to recognize the independence of Kakheti-Hereti, which his father had annexed only a few years before, and the kingdom lost a large part of its territory.

George's ambition lay in the southwest. The Tao domains of David III, who had adopted Bagrat III, had passed to the empire on David's death, and about 1015 George occupied them. Basil II, engaged in Bulgaria until 1018, marched east in 1021 and defeated George on 11 September at Shirimni near Lake Palakazio, where several of Georgia's leading generals fell; George burned Oltisi to cover his retreat and lost Javakheti and Artaani to the pursuing imperial army. He sought an alliance with the Fatimid caliph, and meanwhile intervened in Armenia, where after Gagik I's death in 1020 he took Ani and made Hovhannes-Smbat III his vassal. A second defeat at Svindax in 1022 forced a treaty by which Georgia surrendered Tao, Phasiane, Kola, Artaani, and Javakheti, and George's three-year-old son Bagrat went to Constantinople as a hostage for three years.

George married twice. His first wife, Mariam, was a daughter of Senekerim-Hovhannes Artsruni, the last Armenian king of Vaspurakan, and bore him Bagrat IV and the daughters Gurandukht, Kata, and Martha; his second, Alda, was a daughter of the king of Alania and the mother of Prince Demetrius, whose later claim to the throne troubled Bagrat's reign. The two marriages tied the Bagrationi to the Armenian Artsruni and to the Alan royal house, a link Bagrat IV would renew by his own Alan marriage. George died on 16 August 1027 in Trialeti, at the village of Mqinvarni, and was buried in the Bagrati cathedral at Kutaisi. In his reign the rebuilding of Svetitskhoveli at Mtskheta was begun, and he left the crown to a boy of eight.